Computers have developed from early room-sized mainframes, to personal computers which occupy a portion of a desktop, to early portable "suit case" designs, including the smaller "laptop", "notebook" and "sub-compact" designs. While early portables were bulky and inefficient, the more recent laptops, notebooks and personal digital assistants (PDA) have improved considerably due to the implementation of a portable battery supply, light weight circuitry and computer storage devices in a compact housing which is easily transported by the user. "Notebook" personal computers have increasingly advanced to provide substantially all the functions of conventional desktop computers. As a result of the reduction of the size of the latest portable computing devices, designers have attempted to reduce the size of the keyboard so that it conforms to the overall size of the system.
Some designers have chosen to reduce the size of the keys and thus the keyboards, while others have chosen to eliminate or combine certain functions provided in more conventional keyboards. Other methods have been proposed and implemented to provide a full function keyboard or keyboard function to these smaller computing devices including, for example, hinged and folding keyboards, touch screen keyboards and various screen activation systems.
In response to consumer demand and technological advances, increasingly smaller and specialized computing devices have been designed. Users have embraced the smaller PDAs and the like which, while designed to provide a lesser number of capabilities than personal computers (PCs), provide the most essential and used computer functions in a design which may be carried in a pocket. The specialized functions may include scheduling functions, an address database, spreadsheet applications and simple word processing or note producing applications. These devices, which are typically referred to as digital information devices, computer information appliances, etc, by nature are special use devices. Many of these specialized computing devices combine PDA-like functions with more powerful applications, like full feature Internet connectivity and e-mail capability. In such a case, it would be desirable to have both a touch screen functionality like that provided by a PDA for simple tasks like retrieving a phone number or a calendar, and a convenient keyboard arrangement for other functions such as composing long e-mails, documents or the like. To that end, it would be useful to be able to quickly stow and retrieve the associated keyboard in a convenient manner.